Crest Hill Murder Trial Opens

Defense Points To Woman's Other Lover As Killer

January 10, 1996|By Jerry Shnay, Tribune Staff Writer.

Prosecutors may have DNA evidence, fingerprints, videotapes and a stolen wedding band to link Steven Petric to Deborah O'Rourke's slaying, but Petric's attorneys said prosecutors also have the wrong man.

"He is not the one who committed this murder," George Lenard told a Will County jury Tuesday at the start of Petric's second murder trial.

Lenard insisted that O'Rourke's co-worker and sometimes boyfriend James Green may have been the killer and that strong circumstantial evidence against Green would be brought out in the trial.

O'Rourke, 44, was found stabbed and strangled in her Crest Hill apartment on July 6, 1994. Petric, a maintenance man at the apartment complex, acknowledged having sex with the woman on July 4, but he denied killing her.

Assistant State's Atty. Eric Swanson, who is prosecuting the case with John Flaherty, told the jury during opening statements Tuesday that a bloody washrag found in the woman's bed was stained with Petric's semen.

He also said Petric's fingerprints were on a grocery check-cashing card found in the woman's apartment, that there were videotapes of Petric withdrawing money with O'Rourke's ATM card on July 5, and that when arrested in October, Petric had the woman's wedding ring.

In June 1995, a jury convicted Petric, 34, of Crest Hill of armed robbery in the case but deadlocked on the murder charge.

As in the first trial, Lenard insisted that Green, who worked with O'Rourke at the Illinois Youth Center in Joliet, may be the culprit while saying his client "may have been guilty of theft of a credit card or money."

"This was a crime of passion, not from a robbery," said Lenard, adding that Green and O'Rourke had sex numerous times and that although Green said he had not been with the woman for three weeks before the killing, semen linked to Green was found on O'Rourke's bedsheets.

Lenard said O'Rourke kept an "immaculate apartment" and it was impossible that "she would keep dirty sheets on her bed for three weeks."

O'Rourke broke off her relationship with Green about 10 days before she was killed and about the time Green left for Mississippi. Lenard said that Green returned on July 4 and called O'Rourke's apartment four times that night.

O'Rourke was found strangled with a scarf in which investigators found a male pubic hair that was similar to that of Green.